Just noticed: Only 1GB!

I've been working on an HP laptop, an HP Pavilion dv1000. For the longest time I thought I had 2GB on it. It was always fast enough for anything I needed, and even when I was running tomcat, eclipse and firefox on it, it was great.

Of course this is in linux. There's a windows partition on there, but it's never used. I keep it on because it's a legal copy and it'd be a pain to have to reinstall it. As is too often the case these days, the laptop didn't come with the install CD. I think there's an image on the hard drive, but in typical Microsoft arrogance, that would blow away the whole hard drive, and then I'd have to install linux again and have it resize the windows partition again, etc. And I'm not sure about that image anyway.

So it's all been good and fast for the year and a half that we've had it. The CPU isn't very fast, but we only use it for browsing and email and the occasional web based program. Previously, only in PHP, so nothing that would stress the memory on the box.

I recently noticed though that with eclipse+tomcat+firefox3, the box was swapping. So I finally looked at what linux thought was installed, didn't believe that it had only 1GB and opened up the box. And it really does have just two 512GB sticks in there.

I don't care too much. I'll just run tomcat and firefox and thunderbird on my other, faster, fatter laptop, and eclipse on the HP. I could run one instance of firefox here and not notice, probably. Particularly as I've switched to xfce4 and am liking it. But for now I'll keep firefox on the fatter laptop.

I doubt if I'll buy more RAM for this laptop. I just don't need it :-).